Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
easily watch grazing animals or move to quickly if the weather looked like turning. Hay
has been made there every year for centuries, hay which served to feed the villages' an-
imals and subsequently to fertilize their fields. The meadows played an integral role in the
economic life of the village; it is not clear what purpose the new woodland will serve other
than supplying firewood and providing cover for foxes and badgers to launch attacks upon
the villagers' chickens and wheelybins.
If there were a shortage of woodland in the area, or the settlement were marooned in the
middle of a windswept prairie, then planting meadows with trees might make sense. But
the village is already fringed with a belt of wooded hillside which for the most part nobody
has looked after. The former commons, which had its cattle grids removed about 20 years
ago, became a 'country park' and the sides of the hill are covered with scattered woodland
which is neither grazed nor managed for timber, coppice or firewood, and which is now
carpeted with an understorey of bracken and scrub. The hill opposite was logged for timber
in the First World War, and has since become covered with neglected woodland consisting
of about 50 per cent dense laurel which has killed off every other tree and under which
nothing grows. Meanwhile large swathes of good quality arable land were put over to orch-
ards in the middle of the 20th century, and a large fruit-packing complex was built in the
centre of the village - then at the end of the century all the orchards were grubbed up and
the factory sold off for housing. The village, like most in England, has lost its collective
sense of what constitutes an integrated system of land use.
Its new plantations, which are mirrored in similar well-intentioned ventures in villages
throughout much of England, raise a number of issues. First, the Small Woods Association,
in the late 1990s, estimated that in Britain there were around 175,000 hectares of
broadleaved woodlands under 10 acres in size which had had no management for over 30
our existing woodland, how likely is it that anyone will look after the new ones we plant?
The situation is improving as many small woodlands are currently being bought up and
cared for by people with green aspirations. But anyone who wants to enhance the state of
Britain's woodland should still consider taking over an existing derelict wood before think-
ing of planting a new one.
Second, trees do not require high quality land and some places are better for woodland
than others. The most sensible places for woodland are hilly land, inaccessible spots, poor
quality soils, wet soils, north facing slopes, and where windbreaks are needed in wide open
plains. Woodland does not need much maintenance - and hardly ever does it need urgent
attention - so it tends to be sited further from human habitation than those land uses requir-
ing frequent attention. When I see decent quality pasture or potentially arable land covered
with rows of tree-guards like a military cemetery, I am inclined to wonder whether the trees
might have been better planted somewhere else.
